The Bathing Woman by Tie Ning: Review

A Chinese novel that narrates the lives of its characters from the Cultural Revolution to the go-go 1990s cannot help but be read as an allegory of China’s rise to modernity. After all, there exists a stark generational contrast between parents who are sent to labour camp for being a part of the educated class and their children who are able to hitch a ride to prosperity in the aftermath of Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 gaige kaifang (“reform and opening up”) policy for precisely the same reason.

A Chinese novel that narrates the lives of its characters from the Cultural Revolution to the go-go 1990s cannot help but be read as an allegory of China’s rise to modernity. After all, there exists a stark generational contrast between parents who are sent to labour camp for being a part of the educated class and their children who are able to hitch a ride to prosperity in the aftermath of Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 gaige kaifang (“reform and opening up”) policy for precisely the same reason.

The Bathing Women, the first book by Tie Ning to be translated into English, a best-selling and celebrated novelist in China, embodies this very allegory. The novel focuses primarily on the lives of two sisters who come of age in post-reform China. Tiao, an editor of children’s books at a publishing house, balances her complicated love life with her careerism. Her younger sister Fan exhibits almost pathological levels of sibling rivalry from her perch in America, to where she has fled after becoming disillusioned with what she perceives as generally backwards behaviour in China.

The novel jumps around in time from the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, when Tiao and Fan’s parents are condemned to a labour camp for being outspoken intellectuals, to the 1990s, when Tiao and Fan manage to ride China’s booming wave of double-digit GDP growth to their own middle class existence. The jumbled chronology highlights some incredible contrasts: food shortages and ration cards stand in relation to the Christian Dior counter at the Fuan Famous Brand Department Store, populated by “the sort who got rich overnight and hadn’t learned to conceal their essential vulgarity.”

To Tiao and Fan, the Cultural Revolution is only a series of vague remembrances from a childhood spent as virtual orphans while their parents toiled away at labour camp. Starker moments stand out, such as when Tiao was in first grade and a teacher was forced to eat excrement for “hooliganism,” an anachronistic catch-all crime against the state. However, the sisters’ sense of suffering is more clearly conveyed in the lives of their parents rather than their own hazy memories.

Yixun, their father, is a onetime promising architect whose career was ruined by the Cultural Revolution. Wu, their mother, is racked by guilt over her own past. They are members of China’s “pathetic generation” — those who lost the primes of their lives to the nihilism of a failed political experiment. As they watch China, and their own children, rise in the post-reform era, they feel a perverse mix of pride and revulsion.

When discussing a lover of Tiao’s who also happens to be an architect, Yixun bitterly says, “There’s nothing special about people like him; he just showed up during good times. His smooth sailing was paid for by the sacrifices the previous generation made in the political movements that came, one after the other.”

Indeed, this is a story of suffering and of how that suffering is borne. It is also the story of “the cruelty of time,” and how sacrifice becomes a wasted effort when it occurs in the vacuum of a meaningless revolution.

Given the relative dearth of Chinese literature in translation, The Bathing Women is an interesting read even though it can seem dated at times; it was originally published in China in 2000, which, given the pace of change in the country over the past 12 years, practically makes it an artifact. Despite prose and dialogue that can be stilted at times, on the whole, the novel manages to poignantly portray a China coming of age, sacrificing a generation or two along the way to gilded glory.

Jason Beerman lives and writes in Hong Kong.

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